Introduction to the 2019 EditionElaine BrownWhile the name of the Black Panther Party remains rooted in the American imagination and memory, resounding worldwide, its true history has been revised and falsified by self-styled academics, racist propagandists, and the FBI—in an ongoing effort by the U.S. government, despite the demise of the party, to “discredit and destroy” even the memory of the Black Panther Party, lest history repeat itself. This is particularly true of the postmortem characterizations of Huey P. Newton.
In his autobiography, Seize the Time, Bobby Seale states that if it weren’t for “Brother Huey” there would have been no Black Panther Party.
Huey stated that the party started in the 1600s, specifically with the founding of the first English colony at Jamestown. The party was a continuation of the centuries’ old struggle of Africans seeking freedom in America—from those who rejected slavery by committing suicide, jumping overboard from slave ships sailing the Atlantic in the Triangular Slave Trade, to those who resisted by any means—running away to Canada or aborting the oppressor’s children; to those who openly rebelled, organizing to annihilate and overthrow the Master; to those who fought to survive in post–Civil War America—Booker T. Washington and the Tuskegee Machine, Du Bois’s NAACP, the Universal Negro Improvement Association of Marcus Garvey, Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam, King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee headed by Stokely Carmichael and Rap Brown, Fannie Lou Hamer’s Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. The Black Panther Party took its historical place in this long march.
Huey was the chief ideologue, theoretician, and commander of the party. He guided the Party to use the Marxist dialectical materialist analysis to determine our agenda and action. He argued this was, perhaps, an arbitrary decision, to view phenomena as material, not ethereal or spiritual, as we could be wrong. All schools of thought were based on unproved premises. This could all be a dream. But, he asserted, science would inevitably prove there is a material world, existing independent of our opinions, thoughts, beliefs. Under his leadership, then, the party used dialectical materialism in our effort to understand “the true nature of our oppression” in order to throw off the oppressive yoke.
This Reader exposes the contradiction between the FBI’s and their collaborators’ depictions and demonization of Huey and the reality of his genius, and the danger he posed to the very existence of the racist American social construct, the fundamental basis for the government’s COINTELPRO (FBI Counter-Intelligence Program) agenda to “disrupt, discredit or destroy” the Black Panther Party.
In part I, “The First Steps,” we see the fearlessness of Huey: Don Quixote stepping onto the battlefield of the black liberation struggle with fist and gun raised, challenging to a duel the U.S. corporate government that rules the whole world, galvanizing thousands and thousands of young blacks to join him and organizing others around the world to follow him.
In part II, “The Greatest Threat,” Huey’s correct analyses of the socioeconomic conditions in the United States and in the world reveal the strategic objectives underlying the party’s actions: its Free Breakfast for Children and other “Survival Programs”; its alliances with the Brown Berets and Young Lords and the Young Patriots, among others; its engagement with liberation organizations and efforts around the world, from the “Viet Cong” fighting the war against the U.S. to FRELIMO fighting against the Portuguese colonizers in Mozambique to the Irish Republican Army to the Shining Path in Peru. Thus, the party came to be labeled by the U.S. government as “the greatest threat to the internal security of the United States.” The most significant essay here, giving full expression to Huey’s correct analyses of the economic and military control by the U.S. of the entire world, transforming it from a universe of sovereign nations to a collection of dominated communities, can be found in his “Speech Delivered at Boston College: November 18, 1970.” At the same time, his statement in “The Women’s Liberation and Gay Liberation Movements: August 15, 1970” is critical to understanding the breadth of the party’s agenda, challenging assertions by some that the party was anti-woman and homophobic.
Huey’s sharp and correct statements in part III, “The Second Wave,” regarding the role of the black church in the liberation struggle and the notion of black capitalism, offer study materials for today’s black activists. The most important essays, “Intercommunalism: February 1971,” and “The Technology Question: 1972,” provide the full expression of Huey’s thinking about the absolute power of the U.S. empire, presciently forecasting—decades before the rise of Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon!—the present role of technology and global capitalism as it relates to the lives of black as well as white people in the U.S. He understood early the dying off of industrialization and the explosion of the tech economy, and the role this major shift plays in globalization and U.S. global domination. More significantly, Huey sets forth a theory as to how this new global arrangement inherently portends hope for black people in the U.S., and for all oppressed people in the world, by creating the conditions for advancing the establishment of an egalitarian world society.
In the latter years of his life, approaching and then after the passing of the party, Huey continued to put forward his radical observations of the world, about life itself, and about the ongoing oppression of black and other people by the U.S. empire. Part IV, “The Last Empire,” includes many of these writings, some published for the first time in this volume, as well as an excerpt, “Response of the Government to the Black Panther Party: 1980,” from his UC Santa Cruz doctoral dissertation and last book, War Against the Panthers: A Study of Oppression in America.
This Reader is a critical compilation of some of the most important thoughts and actions of Huey P. Newton and the Black Panther Party he helmed. Huey was indeed the first Panther and the last, the consummate revolutionary to the very end of his life.
ForewordHuey P. Newton and the Black Panther Party he created have passed out of existence, as all things do. Like all things, they leave behind memories, those private sensory recollections sadly destined to be weaned out of history with each new generation. Like some, they leave behind certain tangible references to lives lived and life works. But, in kinship with those rare few whose footprints remain in defiance of time, they leave a legacy, a humane legacy that is a beacon from the past for those of us searching still to cross the abyss of human barbarity that seems written into eternity.
I came to know and embrace the best of Huey Newton, first as a Black Panther Party youth member and later as his wife during the last five years of his life. In that, I am a witness to the enlightened dreams as well as the torture of the dreamer. I came to know that he was the truest revolutionary, seeking always to bring harmony between the nature of things and the state of things, to transform dark into light, to challenge fear and hate with courage and love.
The Huey P. Newton Reader is the first summation of this revolutionary life told in Huey’s own words. From this definitive collection of writings, readers will discover, perhaps for the first time, the astonishing breadth of Huey’s thoughts and actions. For history is a witness to the fact that he acted on his vision by inventing an instrument for freedom and enlightenment called the Black Panther Party.This was his essence and his life’s work, left behind as his personal legacy. As such, the Black Panther Party has left a living legacy, a work begun, but left undone, a foundation laid, a seed sown whose flowers brighten the barren fields today.
Fredrika Newton, President
The Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation
2002
Copyright © 2019 by Huey P. Newton. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
